A comprehensive document of one of the most important American film composers.

Frank Lewin was born in Breslau, Germany in 1925. After settling in the United States his composition teachers included, among others, Roy Harris, Richard Donovan and Paul Hindemith. Over the years Lewin has composed incidental music for plays ranging from Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams, and surround-sound scores for historical outdoor dramas in various parts of the country. He has also written a number of concert and ceremonial pieces, several of them for solo voice and instruments, as well as a number of choral works and two operas. A particularly fertile area for Frank Lewin has been composing for films, both dramatic (fictional stories requiring either "source" music [such as a radio playing in the background] or dramatic musical cues to signify changes in mood or to underline emotions), and documentary (films about real people, situations or scientific advances). Many of the films were independently made, many commissioned by such companies as Western Electric and Alcoa, and a couple were commercial releases (The Angel Levine was a 1970 release featuring Zero Mostel and Harry Belafonte; The Plot Against Harry was directed by Michael Roemer, director of the classic 1964 drama Nothing But a Man). It's possible that you may have seen some of the documentaries in a classroom as a child! In all this is a comprehensive document of one of the most important composers in this field. Other works of Lewin on Albany are the opera Burning Bright (TROY469/71), Three Song Cycles (TROY528) and Sacred Music (TROY769).